Synaesthetic Syntax: Sounding Animation / Visualising Audio

Submission deadline: 17th May 2020
Symposium details: Sunday 13th September 2020, Live Broadcasting Event during the Ars Electronica Festival
Submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ea2020

Faced with the infinite possibilities of faking through digital production, might there be a craving to return to that which is material and sensible: work that is improvised, spontaneous, and can be experienced fully with all the senses? A move away from simulated, synthetic perfection to the handcrafted and the imperfect, which evidences the trace of human touch and intimate presence?

This year the Expanded Animation events at Ars Electronica extend into a dialogue about relationships between the senses, in particular the auditory and the visual. What are the rules, principles, and processes that govern correlations between sound and animation? How might these be explored, unpacked and reassembled?

Our Keynote Speaker is media artist, Rose Bond, who produces work at the juncture of cinema, animation and experiential design. She will be presenting her latest animated collaboration with the Oregon Symphony Orchestra on a live performance of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia.

In response to these themes, we call for academics and artists to propose 20-minute papers that bring the disciplines of music, audio art, and animation together from a variety of perspectives: from historical or theoretical analysis to new and surprising practice. The proposal should include an abstract of no more than 500 words (including references) and a short biography of no more than 200 words.
Submission is via Easy Chair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ea2020 where you will be prompted to set up a free Easy Chair account. All selected speakers will be given a free pass to the 2020 Ars Electronica Festival.

Suggested topics include

Hearing Colour Seeing Sound

Can music become visual? How did pioneers of visual music such as Oskar Fischinger and Mary Ellen Bute translate melody, harmony, and rhythm into the form of animation? And can moving drawings become music? Is Oramics, Daphne Oram’s drawn sound machine, a form of animation? How can historic and/or contemporary practice demonstrate synaesthetic syntax?

In Front of Your Eyes and Ears

With a perceived disparity between the slow time taken to create animation and the instant time taken to perform music, how can animation be performed live? Can the audio and the visual be combined in improvised performance? How can live, hand scribing or music notation or coding or drawing be used to conjure spontaneous audio-visual performance? What is gained from real-time, instant creation in the present moment

Rhythmanalysis

Repetition and difference is at the heart of rhythm, at the heart of the algorithm, at the heart of animation, at the heart of lived experience. Rhythm is everywhere. From the natural – visceral, internal rhythms of the body breathing and the heart pumping or the slow changing of the seasons; to the artificial – externally imposed rhythms ordering us through the ticktock of mechanical clock-time or the ebb and flow of economic cycles. How does rhythm connect audio and animation? What might animation learn from audio and music theory and vice versa?

A Return to the Material

In an age of digital synthesis is there a craving for a return to the material? Do we long for haptic feedback and analogue experience: the touch of guitar strings, the feel of charcoal smearing under the fingers, banging a drum, painting on film? Is this simply a form of nostalgia or might it be thought through in new ways? How can it be brought together in the audio-visual?

Movement and Gesture

Whether performing an instrument or making marks for drawing, the gestural is a core part of human expression. How can kinaesthetic gesture be explored to create new kinds of audio-visual
experiences?

The organisation is a collaboration between:

• Animation Research Centre, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK;
• Audio Research Cluster, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK;
• University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Hagenberg;
• Ars Electronica.

The conference will be held as a live and prerecorded online broadcast as part of Ars Electronica Festival 2020.

All questions about submissions should be emailed to animationresearch@uca.ac.uk